They were well-known at Mabille.9 They used to go there arm in arm after an elegant dinner party and stroll about the garden, nodding at the women and shouting comments after them as they passed. They laughed loudly without letting go of each other’s arms and when conversations became heated helped each other out. The father, who knew how to drive a hard bargain, negotiated a very good price when it came to his son’s amours. Occasionally they would sit down and have a drink with a group of whores. Then they might move to another table or continue their stroll. Until midnight they could always be seen, arms linked like a couple of schoolfellows, chasing skirts down the yellow walkways under the harsh flame of the gaslights.
When they returned home, they brought with them, on their clothing, traces of the tarts they had been with outdoors. Their provocative poses, hints of risqué language, and vulgar gestures filled the apartment on the rue de Rivoli with the reek of dubious alcoves. The lackadaisical and wanton way in which the father offered his hand to his son was in itself enough to indicate where they had been. This was the air that Renée breathed, the source of her sensual caprices and longings. She used to tease the two men nervously.
“So where are you coming from?” she would say. “You reek of tobacco and perfume. . . . I’m sure I’m going to have a migraine.”
And something about the peculiar odor did indeed trouble her deeply. Such was the persistent fragrance of this unusual household.
Meanwhile, Maxime was smitten with a grand passion for little Sylvia. For months on end he bored his stepmother with talk of this prostitute. Renée soon knew all there was to know about her, from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair. She had a slight bruise on her hip; nothing was lovelier than her knees; her shoulders were peculiar in that only the left one was dimpled. Maxime took malicious pleasure in recounting the perfections of his mistress to Renée during their drives together. One evening, on the way home from the Bois, Renée’s carriage was caught with Sylvia’s in a traffic jam, and the two were obliged to sit for a time side by side on the Champs-Elysées.10 The two women stared at each other with keen curiosity, while Maxime, delighted by this critical encounter, snickered to himself. When the calèche resumed its forward motion, Renée’s somber silence made Maxime think she was sulking, and he expected one of those maternal scenes, one of those odd scoldings with which she still occasionally diverted herself in her lassitude.
“Do you know that woman’s jeweler?” she asked him abruptly, just as they reached the place de la Concorde.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he answered with a smile. “I owe him 10,000 francs. . . . Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
Then, after another interval of silence: “She was wearing a very pretty bracelet, the one on her left wrist. . . . I would have liked to have seen it close up.”
They returned home. She said no more about it. But the next day, as Maxime and his father were about to go out together, she took the young man aside and spoke to him in a low voice, with an embarrassed look and a pretty smile as if seeking a favor. He seemed surprised and went off laughing in his wicked way. That evening he brought Sylvia’s bracelet home with him, for his stepmother had begged him to show it to her.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Who wouldn’t steal for you, step-mama?”
“She didn’t see you take it?” Renée asked, as she eagerly examined the bracelet.
“I don’t think so. . . . She wore it yesterday, so she certainly won’t want to wear it today.”
In the meantime the young woman had gone over to the window and put the bracelet on. She held her wrist slightly raised and turned it slowly, ecstatically repeating, “Oh! Very pretty, very pretty. . . . I quite like everything about it, except the emeralds.”
At that moment, with her wrist still held high in the white light of the window, Saccard walked in.
“What have we here?” he cried out in astonishment. “Sylvia’s bracelet!”
“You’re familiar with this item?” she said, more embarrassed than he and not knowing what to do with her arm.
He recovered. He pointed a menacing finger at his son and muttered, “This young scoundrel always has some kind of forbidden fruit in his pocket! . . . One of these days he’ll be bringing us the lady’s arm with the bracelet still on it.”
“Hold on a minute!” Maxime replied with cowardly cunning. “It wasn’t me. It was Renée who wanted to see it.”
“Oh!” was all the husband said.
And he in turn examined the jewelry, repeating the same words as his wife: “It’s very pretty, very pretty indeed.”
Then he quietly left the room, and Renée scolded Maxime for giving her away. He replied that his father couldn’t care less about such things. She returned the bracelet to him.
“You will go see the jeweler,” she said, “and order me one just like this, only you’ll ask him to use sapphires instead of emeralds.”
Saccard could not keep anything or anyone close to him for long without wanting to sell or derive a profit from it. Before his son was twenty it occurred to him that the boy could be useful. A good-looking young man who was the nephew of a minister and the son of an important financier was bound to be a good investment. He was of course a bit young, but one could always search out a wife and dowry for him, and then the wedding could be postponed or hurried along according to the financial needs of the firm. Saccard chose well. At a meeting of a board of directors of which he was a member, he chanced to meet a tall, handsome man by the name of Mareuil, and within two days Mareuil was his. M. de Mareuil had once been a sugar refiner in Le Havre, at which time his name had been Bonnet. After amassing a large fortune, he had married a young noblewoman, also quite wealthy, who had been looking for an imbecile with an impressive face. His first proud trophy was the right to use his wife’s name, but the marriage had made him insanely ambitious: he dreamed of paying Hélène back for her nobility by acquiring a high political position. He immediately invested money in the new newspapers, bought extensive properties in the remote Nièvre, and did all he could to prepare himself to run for a seat in the legislature. Thus far he had failed, though without shedding any of his solemnity. His was the most incredibly empty brain one could possibly encounter. He was a man of superb stature, with the white, pensive face of a great statesman, and since he was a marvelously good listener, with a deep gaze and a majestic calm in his expression, it was possible to believe that he was engaged in a prodigious inner labor of comprehension and deduction. Of course his mind was completely empty. Yet he had a disturbing effect on people, who had no idea whether they were dealing with a superior man or an imbecile. M. de Mareuil clung to Saccard as to a life raft. He knew that an official candidacy was about to open up in the Nièvre and ardently hoped that the minister would designate him. This was the last card he had to play. Hence he put himself completely in the hands of the minister’s brother. Saccard, who sensed a mutually advantageous alliance, encouraged him to think of marrying his daughter Louise off to Maxime. Mareuil was effusive in gratitude, believed that the idea of a wedding had been his own, and considered himself most fortunate to forge an alliance with the family of a minister and to give Louise to a young man whose prospects seemed bright indeed.
Louise, according to her father, was to have a dowry worth a million francs. Misshapen, ugly, and adorable, she was doomed to die young. A lung disease was secretly sapping her health, lending her a nervous gaiety, a soothing grace. Sick little girls age quickly, becoming women before their time. She was naïvely sensual and seemed to have been born at age fifteen, in full puberty. When her father, a healthy, stupid colossus of a man, looked at her, he could not believe that she was his daughter. Her mother, too, had been a big, strong woman in life, but after her death stories were told about her that explained why the child was stunted and had the manners of a bohemian millionaire and the charming ugliness of a debauchee. People said that Hélène de Mareuil had died in the most shockingly dissolute excess. Pleasu
res had eaten away at her like an ulcer, yet her husband, who ought to have had her locked up in an asylum, never noticed her lucid madness. Carried in this diseased womb, Louise emerged with anemic blood, misshapen limbs, and a diseased brain, her memory already steeped in filth. At times she was persuaded that she possessed vague memories of another existence and imagined bizarre, shadowy scenes of men and women embracing, a whole carnal drama that titillated her childish curiosity. It was her mother speaking in her. This vice continued throughout her childhood. As she grew older, nothing shocked her; she remembered everything, or, rather, knew everything already, and she sought out forbidden things with such a sure instinct that she was like a person returning home after a long absence and needing only to reach out in order to feel comfortable and take delight from the surroundings. This strikingly unusual girl, whose instinct for debauchery complemented Maxime’s, also had an innocence in her impudence, a piquant mixture of childishness and boldness, as she went about this second life as a virgin with the knowledge and shame of a grown woman, and in the end Maxime grew to like her and to find her far more amusing even than Sylvia, who, though the daughter of a respectable stationer, had the heart of a moneylender and was at bottom dreadfully middle-class.
The marriage was arranged with smiles all around, and it was decided that the “kids” would be allowed to grow up. The two families enjoyed a close friendship. M. de Mareuil pursued his candidacy. Saccard kept an eye on his prey. It was understood that Maxime’s basket of wedding gifts would include his nomination as an auditor to the Conseil d’Etat.
Meanwhile, the Saccards’ fortune seemed to have reached its apogee. It blazed like a gigantic bonfire in the middle of Paris. It was the hour when the hounds were ardently devouring their share of the spoils, and a corner of the forest was filled with the sounds of dogs barking and whips cracking and the flare of countless torches. The appetites that had been unleashed at last found contentment in the impudence of triumph, in the din of crumbling neighborhoods and fortunes built in six months. The city had become an orgy of millions and of women. Vice, come from on high, flowed through the gutters, spread across ornamental basins, and spurted skyward in public fountains only to fall again upon the roofs in a fine driving rain. And at night, when one crossed the bridges, the Seine seemed to carry off all the refuse of the sleeping city: crumbs fallen from tables, lace bows left lying on divans, hairpieces forgotten in cabs, banknotes slipped out of bodices—everything that brutal desire and immediate gratification of instinct shattered and soiled and then tossed into the street. Then, in the capital’s feverish sleep, better even than in its breathless daylight quest, one sensed the mental derangement, the gilded, voluptuous nightmare of a city driven mad by its gold and its flesh. Violins sang until midnight. Then windows went dark, and shadows fell upon the city. It was like a colossal alcove in which the last candle had been blown out, the last vestige of modesty extinguished. In the depths of the darkness there was now only a great gurgle of frenetic and weary love, while the Tuileries, at the water’s edge, reached out its arms as if to embrace the vast blackness.
Saccard had built his Parc Monceau mansion on land stolen from the city. On the second floor he had reserved for himself a superb study in rosewood and gold, its tall glassed bookcases filled with files and not a single book in sight. The safe, built into the wall, created an iron alcove big enough to hide the amours of a billion francs. There his fortune flourished and insolently displayed itself. Everything he tried seemed to succeed. When he left the rue de Rivoli and adopted a grander style of entertaining, doubling his expenditure, he alluded, in conversations with people he knew well, to substantial profits. To hear him tell it, his partnership with Mignon and Charrier had yielded enormous rewards; his speculations on real estate were doing even better; and the Crédit Viticole was an inexhaustible fountain of cash. He had a way of enumerating his riches that dazzled his listeners and prevented them from getting a clear view of his situation. His Provençal twang became thicker than ever. With his short sentences and nervous gestures he fired off rockets that exploded into millions, leaving even the most incredulous listeners dazzled in the end. His frantic mimicry of a man of means played a large part in the reputation he had acquired of being a lucky gambler. In truth, he was not known to possess any clear, solid capital. His various associates, who were of necessity well-informed as to his situation with respect to themselves, explained his colossal fortune by telling themselves that he must have enjoyed perfect luck in his other speculations—the ones they knew nothing about. He spent prodigiously. Cash flowed continually from his coffers, yet the sources of this river of gold had yet to be discovered. It was pure madness: the rage for money, the handfuls of louis thrown out the windows, the strongbox emptied of its last coin night after night only to be refilled before morning, no one knew how; and never did it disgorge such large sums as when Saccard pretended to have lost the keys.
This was a fortune that roared and overflowed like a winter torrent, which buffeted Renée’s dowry, swept it away, and inundated it. Wary at first, the young woman had wanted to manage her own property, but she quickly wearied of business matters. Then she felt poor compared to her husband and, being overwhelmed by debt, was obliged to turn to him for assistance, to borrow money from him, and to rely on his discretion. With each new bill, which he paid with the smile of a man tolerant of human weakness, she surrendered a bit more of herself, entrusting him with bonds or authorizing him to sell this or that property. By the time they moved to the Parc Monceau mansion, she was already nearly picked clean. Saccard, substituting himself for the state, paid her the interest on the hundred thousand francs from the rue de la Pépinière. In addition, he persuaded her to sell the Sologne property in order to invest the money in an important deal—a superb investment, he told her. All she had left, therefore, was the land in Charonne, which she stubbornly refused to sell in order to spare her excellent Aunt Elisabeth the sorrow. There again he plotted a masterstroke with the help of his former accomplice Larsonneau. In any case, she remained in his debt; if he took her fortune, he paid her back five or six times the income it would have earned. The interest on a hundred thousand francs, together with the yield on the money from Sologne, came to barely nine or ten thousand francs, just enough to keep her in underwear and shoes. He gave her, or paid out on her behalf, fifteen to twenty times that paltry sum. He would have put in a week’s work to rob her of a hundred francs, and he kept her royally. So she, along with everyone else, respected her husband’s monumental treasure without investigating the emptiness of the river of gold that flowed before her eyes and into which she dove every morning.
At Parc Monceau it was a time of delirium and spectacular triumph. The Saccards doubled the number of their carriages and horses. They had an army of servants, whom they dressed in dark blue livery with putty-colored breeches and black-and-yellow-striped waistcoats—rather severe colors that the financier chose in order to give himself a sober appearance, this being one of his fondest wishes. They displayed their luxury on the façade of their house and opened the curtains when they gave great dinners. The fresh breezes of contemporary life, which had rattled the doors of the second-floor flat on the rue de Rivoli, had by now reached the intensity of a genuine hurricane, which threatened to blow down the walls. Amid these princely apartments, along the gilded banisters, upon the thick wool carpets in this fantastic parvenu’s palace, the smell of Mabille lingered; hips were provocatively thrust about as in the fashionable quadrilles of the moment; and the whole era passed by with its mad and foolish laughter, its eternal hunger and eternal thirst. It was a dubious house of worldly pleasure, of impudent ecstasy that enlarged the windows the better to share the secrets of the alcoves with passersby. Here, husband and wife lived lives free of restraint before the eyes of their servants. They divided up the house and camped out in it, appearing to be not in their own home but as if cast ashore at the end of a tumultuous and dizzying voyage, living in a regal hotel, rushing out with
out even taking the time to unpack their bags so as to savor the pleasures of a new city as quickly as possible. They lodged there by the night, staying home in the evening only when there was a banquet and otherwise perpetually caught up in the whirlwind round of Parisian society, occasionally returning home for an hour as a traveler might return to a room in an inn between two excursions. Renée felt more anxious there, more nervous. Her silk skirts glided with a snakelike hiss over the thick carpets and along the satin upholstery of the love seats. She was irritated by the stupid gilding all around her, by the high, empty ceilings beneath which nothing remained after a festive evening except the laughter of the young fools and the sententious pronouncements of the old scoundrels. To fill this sumptuous space, to inhabit these radiant premises, she would have liked to find some supreme amusement, for which she avidly searched high and low throughout the mansion, from the small sun-colored salon to the conservatory with its thick vegetation, but to no avail. Saccard, meanwhile, realized his dream: he played host to the world of high finance, to MM Toutin-Laroche and de Lauwerens; he also received leading politicians such as Baron Gouraud and Haffner, the deputy; even his brother the minister had been kind enough to come two or three times to shore up Saccard’s situation with his presence. Like his wife, however, Saccard suffered from nervous anxieties, from a restlessness that made his laughter sound oddly like breaking glass. He became so frenetic and skittish that acquaintances said, “That devil Saccard is making too much money, it will drive him mad!” In 1860 he was decorated after doing the prefect a mysterious favor that involved acting as a front for a certain lady in a transaction related to land.